Google Calendar Outages

Because this is a calendaring blog and we should be keeping track of stuff like this:

Google Calendar Dies One Hour After Google Tweets About How Great It Is [Update]

The most interesting thing in this article was the  link to the G Suite status dashboard which, frankly, I have difficulty finding off the main G Suite "Give us your money NOW" site.

Read "Freedom for Users, Not for Software"

We've been watching the migration to the cloud for a while now -- wondering when everybody was going to wise up that data centers were farming them into cruelty-free meat by-products.

I was recently at a Christmas party with some people from a Redmond-based software corporation that makes Exchange.  Their take: Office 365 made their lives and their customers lives much more convoluted.  Where they could work solutions in on-premises servers, any changes to Office 365 need to be escalated at the corporate level.  And we all know how convenient and easy that is.  So they're increasingly seeing combined Office 365 and on-premises Exchange environments, precisely the opposite of what they and the customer predicted or wanted.

SO it's is with great fervor that I suggest you read Freedom for Users, Not for Software by Benjamin Mako Hill.

He hits it right on the money with his analysis of the market confusion initially arising from "free software" which was re-cast as "open software" (goals with which it is hard to disagree! What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?) and the way this term was used and abused in the industry.  The aspect that I suggest you pay closest attention to is the emphasis on users. Focused on the server-side of the client-server model, we at Sumatra would substitute the term "consumers" for "users" to avoid the further linguistic confusion that comes from the distinction between "users" and "administrators" in such environments.  Both the admin and the user are consumers, and the user-admin collective together face the "user" conundrum.

After years in this business, I'm pretty sure the dynamics of the industry are never going to allow the ideals of the open software movement to be fully realized in any software that is both marketable and useful.  The lure of dollars is too strong.  When software remained the exclusive domain of academics and cowboys it was possible.  These guys were happy to have a car and an apartment.

But once venture capital and the stock market took hold these ideals were not going to stand up to the motivation of owning a private jet and a McMansion.

What's this have to do with the movement to the cloud?  It's all the same dynamic based on much of the same software with the scions of the same corporations promising freedom while actually building feudal digital fiefdoms.  Do not go mindlessly with the flow when you hear that your support problems are going to go away and your life is going to be easier.  You might luck out, but really look at what your business goals are and how you're going  to deal with realistic software disaster scenarios while your business processes are directly under someone else's control.

As we often quote Ronald Reagan: "Trust, but verify."

Follow-on to the Headaches of Cloud Migration

As a follow-on to our earlier postings, you might want to check out

http://ferris.com/2011/06/03/moving-to-hosted-exchange-plan-for-hiccups/

There is never a free ride when you move an entire server.

Zimbra 6 to Exchange 2010 calendar migration

It's been a year since Yahoo sold Zimbra to VMware (which reminded me of some of the scenes from prison movies involving cigarettes).

And now is when people are starting to contact us en masse asking if we can move their calendars from Zimbra 6 to Exchange 2010.

Yes, we can.

The way we do it is really convenient. We open the mySQL database and read all the calendar, contact, and task data directly and insert it into Exchange using our usual, field-proven process.
You heard that right: NO user intervention, one spot for an Admin to pull the data and insert the data.

So let's take a look at the BEFORE and AFTER.

Jimi Hendrix's calendar on Zimbra 6.0.7 looks like this:

After extraction and insertion into Live @ Edu it looks as we would expect:

Note, the tentative meeting is tentative, the accepted is accepted, and the declined doesn't appear because that's the way Exchange works. We keep all recurrences and the meetings are completely LIVE on live @ Edu.

But wait -- there's more.
Contacts and Tasks come along for the ride too.

But we'll show you those in a separate posting.

Quotas and Live @ Edu Migrations

The calendar elves were busy this weekend migrating TWO former Oracle Calendar Server sites into Exchange in this Cloud thing.


One went into BPOS (one of the dumbest acronyms EVER!) which is in reality Exchange 2007, which does NOT have submission quotas. (So now you know where this is heading)


The other site went into Live @ Edu which, despite their having had their submission quotas removed for purposes of migration, found the quotas very much in place.


So this is about what you'll see if one of your users hits submission quota in a migration.

In this example we kept inserting meetings until we hit quota. So one went in fine (you see the guest list and responses) and one did NOT (it says "Invitations haven't been sent for this meeting").

Once your submission quota rolls over (and when is that exactly?) you can send this and it'll go out like a regular meeting invitation. Not fatal in a migration, but we agree, it is darned annoying.

Asynchronous Programming

Earlier this week I went to a Microsoft Firestarter Event on Windows Azure. The event was run by a Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jim O'Neil. Jim's talks always inspire me to tweak Sumatra's code bases, ensuring we take advantage of as much of the emerging Microsoft technology as practical. One segment of the day talked about patterns and practices, specifically, the use of asynchronous communication when interacting with cloud (and the web).

They told us about a new Asynchronous Programming module (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async.aspx.) I'm very interested in this because many customers in Sumatra's Education market segment are migrating to Exchange in the Cloud -- Microsoft's
Live@EDU. When inserting lots of data, the variability of "network speed" makes insertion times difficult to predict. We explored changing the Sumatra code to run on multiple threads, but concluded it added more complexity to the code and didn't address the underlying bottleneck: network latency.

What I find interesting about this CTP is that the new async calls have the potential to work around latency issues without increasing code complexity. We'll be testing this in our labs in the next few weeks!

Oracle Calendar to Exchange Live at Edu - the Video

We got a request for a video showing data migration from Oracle Calendar to Live @ Edu.

We put together an ad hoc committee to create the clearing for the conversation for possibility..... ah heck.... we just put some software up and did it.

Michael Moore has nothing to be afraid of.

You can also view it off our main site at http://www.sumatra.com/ocs-to-exchange.wmv

The melodious voice you hear is Zyg (whose role in Sumatra is the moody "Ben Affleck" character in contrast to Russ's "Matt Damon" persona).

Interested in trying it out? Our contact page is here.

Migrating Oracle Calendar Server into the Microsoft Exchange Cloud

The calendar gnomes have been busy.

We have gotten some requests to take Oracle Calendar Server into this Microsoft "cloud" thing (which last time I looked had a couple of different names).  Of course we started with Live @ Edu because that's where the first money is.

So if we look at Jimi's calendar in Oracle Calendar we see:

and if we look at his calendar in Sumatra's LIVE@ edu test system we see the exact same thing (minus the color which you cannot port anyway).

Some of you will notice the one appointment that's not there, which led us into looking at timing issues in Live @ Edu.  We found that changing our CAS and EWS URLs for the insertion to remove the "PSH" part removed the issue.

If your Outlook.com server is something like
PODnnnnnnPSH.outlook.com

use:
PODnnnnnn.outlook.com

instead on insertion.

... and Jimi's calendar comes out fine everywhere.  So in case you find yourself missing some data, check the URL you're pointing to.  We obviously don't have as much control over timing and performance in this scenario as we do in a native Exchange environment.  So the first few who go live with our tech are going to be taking the earliest risks for timing and the eternal X-Factor.

Oh yeah, this would work for Meeting Maker, Zimbra, Sun Java Calendar, anything else we can migrate.  But let's face it, Oracle Calendar Server is the one everyone is currently looking to drop ASAP.

This all involved minor changes to the SuExchange interface, mainly to specify Credentials to your CAS server.  Your Live admin account is the one to use:

This also means there's no need to "Run as..." with the Service Account.  Your  CAS credentials effectively ARE the Service Account.

There's also good news on conference rooms, which are looking like we can Accept and Decline them under our control but as always we want more field tests to make sure we're not drinking our own Kool-Aid: 

Keep in mind: our distinction is that we re-create meetings with guest lists and responses and re-create recurrence patterns in moving from OCS to Exchange, and that is the same whether going to the cloud or a native Exchange server.

So from the perspective of your end users it's a migration with results that make it act as though you've been using Exchange all along.

When the Cloud disappears why does everyone not fall to earth?

Gmail went down again on September 1, 2009.

My schadenfreude finally met my Weltanschauung.

Of course, I got THIS one at 3:43 PM PDT which was DARNED confusing:

So with everyone who's been looking to migrate into Google Calendar: be really careful what you ask for.

And to everyone already there: migrating OUT of Google Calendar into Exchange is a LOT easier than a real time server-side synch between the two.

Gmail outage. So why put corporate calendars there?

So we run on Exchange and have been leery of entrusting our infrastructure to a company that not only makes the software but hosts, updates, runs, and (pretty much) controls everything that has to do with it except what data we choose to put in and if we want more in this endless fraternity hazing-like ritual of submission and humiliation.

But when GMail was down and Google's response could be summarized as "yep it is" we looked on it with a certain schadenfreude. We've not been encouraging corporations to go to Google Calendar, and we're now less likely to encourage it anytime soon.

Does Exchange ever go down and strand a corporation for hours? Oh yeah -- believe me it does -- and we have the stories. But one Exchange installation going down doesn't bring EVERYBODY ELSE down with it.

To be fair, if you were using Outlook as a client Gmail seems to have worked through the storm, but that's got to be cold comfort to the crew coordinated out of California: "If you used our hated competitor as a front end interface you'd have been fine."

Cloud computing is just not yet a player for serious corporate infrastructure.